[Mailman-Users] Digest indexes

[Jay Ashworth]

--- Original Message -----
> From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org>

> Andrew Hodgson writes:
> 
> > I run a high volume list (around 80 messages per day), and we have
> > complaints from digest users that the digests are difficult to work
> > with. One requested feature is could the digests be in HTML
> > format, and a link be presented in the table of contents to go to
> > each message. Can this be done in Mailman by working with the
> > digest templates?
> 
> No, it cannot be done without coding.
> 
> And it would not be easy. HTML does not provide a "mail message"
> element, so although it would be trivial to create the table of
> contents, there is no good way to indicate what is at the other end of
> those links.
> 
> So the approach would have to be to rip the messages into their
> component atoms and put them back together, with all the pieces either
> suppressed as "uninteresting" or reencapsulated in HTML for
> presentation. Images and attachments would have to be handled. In
> other words, somebody would have to write a web mail program.

I believe that what Andrew is really looking for is just something
that could put in anchor links to the beginning of each message's 
test as the message is HTMLified.  I agree that it would require code,
but I don't think that code would need to have semantic knowledge of
mail messages; it only needs to know where the edge of each message
is.

It's possible there's enough syntactical information in a current
RFC-format digest to get that done, and for all I know, there may 
be code out there to do it already.

The key question is: if there *is* something which can take an RFC
formatted digest message, and convert it to multipart/mixed with 
an HTML body as Andrew's users desire... is there anyway to get
Mailman to *call* that, in the digestifying process?

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra at baylink.com
Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC 2100
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